A treat for students of language, as well as would-be Don Rickles heirs looking to hone their craft.
An entertaining study of the taunts and insults that pervade sports and the larger culture.
Consider the dozens, “a ritualized insult game endemic to Black communities” that is both playful and (sometimes literally) deadly serious, always designed to get inside your opponent’s head. Take it up a few notches, and you have Muhammad Ali, “the veritable godfather of modern trash talk.” Though an ascended master of trash talk, Ali was no pioneer. Kohan, the author of The Arena, traces it a couple of centuries back, locating incivility in American politics as well as sports and popular culture. The author opens with modern professional wrestling and MMA competitions, where bigmouth putdowns are the currency of the realm. He effectively links this nasty (if often staged) streak to what he calls the “Trump disinhibition effect” of the present, where Ali would seem the most diffident of interlocutors against the blustering ex-president, who promulgated an ethos ranging “from general rudeness to outright dickishness, in politics and well beyond.” In this light, Kohan cites instances where insult comics backed off, recognizing that their poking fun was crossing the line into verbal abuse. The author deeply examines the psychology of trash talk, connecting it to the more positive quality of empathy—for, as primatologist Frans de Waal tells him, “In order to be cruel, you need to know what is hurtful to someone.” Kohan is also enough of a connoisseur of trash talk to distinguish the effective but relatively harmless slapdown from racist, misogynist, homophobic, or downright mean slurs—again a product of that disinhibition effect, which seems to be the current state of what should instead be a fine art of genteel character assassination.
A treat for students of language, as well as would-be Don Rickles heirs looking to hone their craft.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781541788916
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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